Book Lovers

Lucy Knisley, the author of French Milk, is back and better than ever.  So many books are being published today warning about the dangers of food.  In this graphic memoir, Knisely celebrates the joys and importance of food throughout her life.  Each chapter even ends with an illustrated recipe.  This book is a lot of fun to read and is guaranteed to make you want to rush into the kitchen and get cooking.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of America's most popular poetry journal, current Poetry magazine editors Don Share and Christian Wiman put together 100 of the "best" poems to grace their esteemed journal's pages. The poetry here is certainly of the Modernist variety (and the editors make no bones about that in their introduction) and contains some of the more anthologized poetry of the last 100 years, including Ezra Pound's "In a Station at the Metro", T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Robert Creeley's "For Love", and James Wright's "The Blessing". But they also include poems that are more of the lost classics by past master variety, like Theodore Roethke's "Florist Root Cellar," Wallace Stevens "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", and Sylvia Plath's "Fever 103". Also included is a fair amount of contemporary works, including gems by Laura Kasischke, Lucille Clifton, and Craig Arnold. This journal has seen all of the greats of modernist poetry over the last 100 years and, if you're a fan or a casual observer, this collection is a great way to re-engage with the greats and introduce yourself to some new practitioners. Note: these poems can also be found at the Poetry Foundation's great website, www.poetryfoundation.org (which also has a wonderful blog and many great articles on past and contemporary poets).

The police at the Stockholm CID special cases unit have enough going on in their own personal lives when the case of an apparent murder-suicide of a clergyman/activist and his wife is assigned to them.  Added to this is the hit and run killing of an unidentified man.  As the detectives investigate the killings they're not convinced of the suicide angle.  Could it be part of a refugee smuggling operation gone wrong? 

As protagonists go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more disagreeable, brooding, and on the mark than Andrea Camilleri’s, Inspector Salvo Montalbano. Set in Sicily, Inspector Montalbano unravels an odd supermarket heist with the goods left abandoned in plain sight and dying words that lead him to an illegal arms cache in a mountain cave. But what he finds there leaves him scratching his head, the bodies of two very young lovers dead since World War II, and carefully arranged with coins, a water jug, and a faithful terra-cotta dog.  What Montalbano lacks in warmth and charm can only be topped by his dry humor and the interesting characters that surround him.  This is the second in the Montalbano series.